Tier two and three cities driving e-commerce growth in India: AppsFlyer’s Ronen Mense

Ronen Mense, VP, Asia, AppsFlyer talks about the global app economy at large and how it has changed over the yearsAritra Sarkhel | ETtech | Updated: July 19, 2016, 09:27 IST

Ronen MenseThere are more than 4 million apps across platforms like iOS and Android today and it is increasingly getting difficult for app marketers to get a hold of more end customers and monetize at the same time.

This is where Israel based mobile marketing analysis organization AppsFlyer is playing a major role in helping the app advertisers with relevant analytics regarding customer retention and monetary growth. In an interview with ETtech, Ronen Mense, VP, Asia, AppsFlyer talks about the global app economy at large and how it has changed over the years.

What is driving the global mobile app economy?

Consumers are driving the app economy. We are in touch with technology more than we have ever been. We are creating more data than we have ever done in the history of humankind and the device in our pockets is the most important thing in our daily lives right now. We as consumers are driving the engagement with apps.

In terms of numbers, how is the Indian mobile app market in 2016 and how much do you see that expanding in the coming years?

Android is dominating the market from every single data point that we look at. Also, India is below the global average in terms of in app purchasing while Asia stands 40% above the global average. In India, the Tier 2 and 3 cities are driving a lot of growth for the ecommerce and marketplaces business.

In terms of in app purchases, where does China stand compared to India?

In China, the in app purchases and the whole payment ecosystem is extremely advanced and people are getting rid of other type of payment tools. For example, - the number of transactions by Alipay China is second only to Visa.

Probably in India, players like Paytm will furnish their data in the near future in terms of number of transactions they are doing per second.

What are the best ways to drive app retention?

Firstly, the companies need to thoroughly test their apps before it goes to market which is not the case. If your app does not work, consumers would not wait for you to fix the bugs; they will simply go to other apps in the marketplace.

Secondly, as an app maker, you have to respect the user's privacy. You have to be very careful as to how you interact with the consumer. For example, if you send too many push notifications, it will annoy the user and they will uninstall the app. You also have to make sure that the app serves a purpose and onboard the user correctly. You have to analyze the user's behavior and act accordingly.

How is AppsFlyer different from competition like App Annie or anyone else?

App Annie is not a competitor. We rather complement one another in this market. App Annie does store analytics and while we do campaign analytics.

Our platform is built on proprietary technology and as our platform grows, we get feedback from customers, and act according to that. Last year alone, we released more features on our platform than most of our competition combined. We released uninstall tracking recently to know when users install and uninstall an app. Moreover, Deep Linking is a very powerful tool that we believe is going to drive a lot of the marketing going forward in the app economy. This technology gives you the ability to send a user to a page inside your app.

How do developers successfully monetize mobile apps?

Statistically speaking, only 2 to 5 percent of the users ever monetize. The monetizing user base is very small and the paying users are very small today. There are different ways marketers can monetize these users. One is through in app purchases which are very straight forward. The other way is through ad monetization wherein you will probably see a video and then get some points and go to the next level or click on an ad and then install the said app to be rewarded. Lastly, we have the freemium model which many app developers use nowadays.

Which platform is better for developing - iOS or Android?

It's more difficult to develop on iOS compared to other platforms. It's traditionally taken more time for an app to get approved on the iOS store, and but now the app approval has gone down to 48 hours. As a developer, your time to market has shortened significantly. For android, it takes a maximum of 2 hours for the app to get released in the market unless there is some violation. We found that retention of apps in android and iOS is almost the same.

How should developers get around App Discovery?

It's very difficult now to get discovered. So you have to know, where you are getting your users from. The app install data is effectively dead. It's so easy to get an app installed on the device and it takes 30 seconds to remove it to. The app install is meaningless to a developer. We are working on deep initiatives right now in what we call LTV - Life time value and helping developers to measure life time value of an app.

What is valuable to you as a developer - a registered user, a user who has gotten pass level 86 in the game, someone who has booked the flight on the app, what is that value and how you are measuring that? You need to measure those data points from social network platforms, ad networks, and email marketing companies, whatever it is and make sure that they are aligned with your goals.

How is AppsFlyer's association with Facebook going?

We are an official measurement partner for them and one of the few global companies who is allowed to send the device level data back to the advertiser. When Facebook opened their mobile advertising or mobile app ads, the pain point remained as to how an advertiser could connect to Facebook to be able to serve ads and there are many folks around who would like to advertise on Facebook, but those advertisers need to advertise on other channels apart from the social networking platform. Therefore in this regard, our technology enables an advertiser to connect into one platform and access the entire industry. We are one of the few partners under Facebook's MMP - Mobile measurement partner.